Here’s a typical headline and lead about Trump’s 2018 budget request as it applies to the Department of Education:
While there are some non-trivial cuts to higher education and the budget does cut the 21st Century Learning Centers after-school program (which a large evaluation found predictably ineffective, with zero impacts on academic outcomes and two negative impacts on disciplinary outcomes), it’s just not true that this budget has cuts “spread across K-12.” Here are the eight main line items of the Elementary, secondary, and vocational education section of the Department of Education, in millions of dollars, starting with the present year (2017 was requested by Obama, not Trump):
And here are the same eight line items, as a percentage of their 2017 level:
It’s just not true that this budget appreciably cuts allocations to K-12 education.
